The embodiments described herein relate generally to electrical busway and, more particularly, to an adjustable joint for joining electrical busway sections.
Elongated rectangular flat conductive bus bar members are conventionally insulatively arranged within electrical busway sections for transporting multi-phase high current electric power through industrial establishments. Successive elongate busway sections are electrically connected or interlocked together in end-to-end relation to provide electrical continuity between a power source and a power consuming load.
When offset or non-longitudinally aligned busway sections are electrically interconnected in a conventional installation, one or more self-contained busway joint is typically employed. In order to preserve the thermal properties of the individual busway sections, the busway joint is conventionally constructed with electrically conductive splice plates and interleaving insulative plates fixedly held together by insulative bolts.
Busway sections are generally manufactured and distributed in the form of pre-manufactured fixed-length sections, so that a number of such electrical busway joints are required to install an extended length busway run in an industrial facility. At each junction between two fixed-length busway sections, a busway joint is necessary to electrically connect the two busway sections.
In many cases, the fixed-length sections are longitudinally offset from each other in a given installation. As a result, two custom length busway joint elbows need to be manufactured, adding significant cost and time to the installation. For example, installers typically need to order non-standard or custom length bus way offset elbow joints to complete an installation. The custom length busway elbows joints typically need to be manufactured to a specified length and the installer has to wait until it is delivered to finish installation of the busway run.
It would be desirable to provide a busway joint having an adjustable length to cooperate with adjacent longitudinally-offset busway sections to eliminate the need for a custom length busway joints and elbow joints. It would further be desirable to provide a busway system that allows an installer to order an adjustable busway joint at the same time as ordering the busway sections. It would also be desirable to provide a longitudinally adjustable busway joint configured to couple two non-aligned busway sections.